Credit:
ESO/A. Fujii/Digitized Sky Survey 2Music:
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Editing
and Conversion: Scientific FrontlineESO is
released a magnificent VLT image of the giant stellar nursery
surrounding NGC 3603, in which stars are continuously being born.
Embedded in this scenic nebula is one of the most luminous and
most compact clusters of young, massive stars in our Milky Way,
which therefore serves as an excellent “local”
analogue of very active star-forming regions in other galaxies.
The cluster also hosts the most massive star to be “weighed”
so far.

NGC 3603 is a starburst region:
a cosmic factory where stars form frantically from the nebula’s
extended clouds of gas and dust. Located 22 000 light-years
away from the Sun, it is the closest region of this kind known in
our galaxy, providing astronomers with a local test bed for
studying intense star formation processes, very common in other
galaxies, but hard to observe in detail because of their great
distance from us.

The nebula owes its shape to
the intense light and winds coming from the young, massive stars
which lift the curtains of gas and clouds revealing a multitude
of glowing suns. The central cluster of stars inside NGC 3603
harbors thousands of stars of all sorts the majority have masses
similar to or less than that of our Sun, but most spectacular are
several of the very massive stars that are close to the end of
their lives. Several blue supergiant stars crowd into a volume of
less than a cubic light-year, along with three so-called
Wolf-Rayet stars — extremely bright and massive stars that
are ejecting vast amounts of material before finishing off in
glorious explosions known as supernovae. Using another recent set
of observations performed with the SINFONI instrument on ESO’s
Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have confirmed that one
of these stars is about 120 times more massive than our Sun,
standing out as the most massive star known so far in the Milky
Way.

The clouds of NGC 3603 provide
us with a family picture of stars in different stages of their
life, with gaseous structures that are still growing into stars,
newborn stars, adult stars and stars nearing the end of their
life. All these stars have roughly the same age, a million years,
a blink of an eye compared to our five billion year-old Sun and
Solar System. The fact that some of the stars have just started
their lives while others are already dying is due to their
extraordinary range of masses: high-mass stars, being very bright
and hot, burn through their existence much faster than their less
massive, fainter and cooler counterparts.

The newly released image,
obtained with the FORS instrument attached to the VLT at Cerro
Paranal, Chile, portrays a wide field around the stellar cluster
and reveals the rich texture of the surrounding clouds of gas and
dust.